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Every week, baking expert Alice Medrich will be going rogue on Food52 -- with shortcuts, hacks, and game-changing recipes.

Today: No need to temper chocolate before dipping cherries (or anything else, for that matter) in it -- once you know Alice's secrets.

Don’t let the season come and go without dipping some gorgeous ripe cherries in chocolate. There is no skill required to produce these elegant, yet kid-friendly sweets.

And no need to temper the chocolate either: the secret to preventing the chocolate from turning grey and streaky is to dry and chill the cherries before dipping, and refrigerate them again immediately after dipping. There is nothing more to it. (The same goes for other fruits like strawberries, or figs -- wet slices or segments will contaminate the chocolate and thicken it, so dry them well!)

But please don’t cheat on the chocolate. Choose a bar that you love to nibble. Don’t choose chocolate chips (because they don’t melt well), and don’t choose “chocolate coating” that you might see sold in the produce aisle for dipping strawberries, because (trust me) it isn’t delicious enough -- real chocolate with nothing added is better. The cherries deserve it and so do you!

Alice's most recent book, Sinfully Easy Delicious Desserts, doles out delicious dessert recipes that don't take hours of prep (a lot of them don't even require turning on the oven) -- everything from lattice-free linzer to one-bowl French chocolate torte.

My career was sparked by a single bite of a chocolate truffle, made by my Paris landlady in l972. I returned home to open this country’s first chocolate bakery and dessert shop, Cocolat, and I am often “blamed” for introducing chocolate truffles to America. Today I am the James Beard Foundation and IACP award-winning author of eight cookbooks, teach a chocolate dessert class on Craftsy.com, and work with some of the world’s best chocolate companies.